After human beings lived in groups, plague became an important event affecting the progress of human civilization. The huge uncontrollable and danger made the word plague and its cultural representation full of magic color. Prior to the intervention of modern medicine, plague was constantly mystified and demonized, with religious discourse, authoritarian systems, and ethnic forces invoking the concept to achieve control or regime change. With the development of modern medicine, the naming and prevention of plague has been placed in the scientific system. However, biochemical technology, genetic engineering, planet exploration and other controversial scientific and technological means make people once again sprout the fear of bacteria, virus and plague. Plague imagination is closely related to the development of science and technology.

The word plague itself has a long concept history and multiple interpretation environments. The changes of concepts and different interpretations can be found in movie texts. As a cultural and artistic product, film itself is the product and symptom of social history and can be used as an intermediary to understand social and cultural changes. Hollywood movies, in particular, are highly sensitive to changes in the world and civilization and provide readable texts. 

For example, the seventh Seal offers religious and philosophical interpretations of the plague. Resident Evil, The Andromeda Strain, Planet Terror and other films provide imaginations of biological and alien viruses. Films like Independence Day add narratives about computer viruses. These films reflect the imagination and annotation of plague in a specific historical period, and also extend many social metaphors. From the changes of related films, we can find that many science fiction films constantly use plague to express the imagination and prediction of the development of science and technology, and the representation of plague has completed the transformation from religion and witchcraft to the pain and consequences of science and technology.

The purpose of this study is to sort out different kinds of imagination and changes of plague representation in film texts, and to see the change of public concept of plague. This paper will study Hollywood movies about infectious disease through content analysis and text analysis, and investigate the causes, prevention methods, ending methods and social metaphors of plague.